Archived Article By Tom Fitzmorris Originally published November 1, 2006 Click here for the current edition Emeril Raises $2.5 Million For Local Kids Over The Weekend Carnivale du Vin, a high-end fundraising food-and-wine event instituted by Chef Emeril Lagasse before the storm last year, brought in two and a half million dollars for an assortment of education-related local charities Friday and Saturday. Pretty good for a two-day event. Especially since last year's inaugural had to be moved out of town because of you-know-what. Six hundred people attended the gala dinner Saturday night, at which Emeril and a few of his chef friends--Mario Batali, Wolfgang Puck, and Lydia Bastianich, to name a few, plus the chefs from all of Emeril's own restaurants--sent out a six-course dinner with some terrific wines. That was followed by a live auction of some rare lots of wine, and a concert with Allan Toussaint, Irma Thomas, and Michael McDonald. (I'll report on the event in detail in my Dining Diary in a day or two.) Grants were announced to several local agencies. The biggest went to Café Reconcile, to create the Emeril Lagasse Foundation Culinary Learning Center. Other large grants went to Second Harvest Kids' Café and Covenant House's Covenant Café.  All these are operations that not only get food out, but train young people to become professionals in the hospitality industry. Which, of course, is the top occupation of our city, and always will be. Last year at this time, while Emeril was getting this thing going, he weas being beaten up pretty bad by the Times-Picayune and its restaurant critic. I thought then that it was more than a little unfair, but now it seems even more so. I think that we're so unaccustomed to having one of our own perform such major works of assistance in the recovery that we don't see what they do. (Indeed, Carnivale du Vin has been very little covered in the press, especially the newspaper.) Instead, we keep looking for the diddly-squat projects we're accustomed to. A few thousand here, a few thousand there. Not that those aren't worthwhile. But just in the way that there's more to New Orleans dining than poor boy shops, so too do we need the big hitters. Last year, the crux of the newspaper's criticism of Emeril was that he wasn't here waving at people. Instead, he was raising millions. That's what we ought to be doing as a community. It's coincidental that in this month's Reader's Digest, Emeril is quoted as saying, "In order to be big, you have to think big. If you think small, you're going to be small." We need to be big right now. © 2006 Tom Fitzmorris. All rights reserved. news@nomenu.com